Medical institutions and facilities offer an increasingly wide range of services and procedures to meet the needs of their patients and staff. Hospitals, clinics, and other medical institutions may include simple single-office clinics, or large integrated establishments comprised of a wide array of cooperating departments and facilities. Moreover, even smaller clinics may be partially or fully integrated into a larger institution at a single location, or geographically disbursed from one another. In all of these cases, information technology is becoming a key component in the exchange of data and services needed to carry out the mission of the facilities.
In a typical clinic or hospital, for example, a radiology department may dispose of various types of imaging systems, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems, computer tomography (CT) systems, ultrasound systems, x-ray systems, and so forth. Certain of these systems may be stationary, while others may be moved around the facility as needed. A radiology department informational system (RIS) may be interconnected with these various imaging systems to coordinate their operation, as well as to facilitate their review of images by radiologists and diagnosing physicians. In certain institutions, these various pieces of equipment may be interconnected in a network, typically in a local area network (LAN) architecture.
In addition to radiology equipment, various other equipment within a medical facility may be monitored or networked at a departmental or institutional level. Patient monitors, for example, may offer some degree of networking capability, allowing patients to be tracked and their physiological condition to be monitored remotely. Patient records, accounting records, and the like may similarly be associated in different individual systems, with certain of the information being cross-referenced in a hospital information system (HIS).
While certain of the equipment within a hospital or other medical institution can be designed to function completely independently of other equipment or service providers, many individual systems or subsystems are now designed to interactively communicate information with outside components. For example, in the diagnostic imaging field, individual systems are now commonly equipped with a modem by which they may transmit and receive image data, service information, reports, and so forth. In certain instances, operations personnel may log on to a network, such as the internet, or a virtual private network, to transmit and receive data directly from the imaging system. Other equipment within an institution may be similarly equipped for data communication, either individually or via a departmental work station or similar interface.
While individual networks within a medical facility may function adequately for most purposes, they pose certain problems on the level of coordination and delivery of data, and may strain the infrastructure of the institution. Depending upon the type of connections provided, for example, medical diagnostic imaging systems may each require a separate communications line to insure connectivity when needed. In a typical setting, these communication lines are conventional telephony cables which must be installed and maintained for the individual systems, even when the systems are not logged on to a network or transmitting data. When data is transmitted to or from individual pieces of equipment or individual LAN's of an institution, separate accounting may be required, and interface components must separately route the data to and from each system or piece of equipment connected to a LAN. Again, this procedure may require separate connection procedures via dedicated lines, adding not only to the overall cost of the system and infrastructure, but adding substantial time and additional steps to the data interchange process.
While some progress has been made toward linking individual networks and systems of medical institutions, further improvements are needed. There is a particular need, at present, for a technique which would permit and coordinate the exchange of data among internal systems and networks of a medical facility, and with external resources, such as service providers. The need extends both to relatively small institutions or clinics, which may have a few pieces of medical diagnostic imaging equipment, to large integrated institutions in which entire departments may be served by outside resources and communicate with those resources completely independently from one another under present schemes.